Have you ever wondered what the front page of the Internet looks like? Go to Reddit (https://www.reddit.com), and you ll see what it looks like! Reddit is the 6 th most popular website in the world, and 4 th most visited site in the United States with over 330 million active users. The site is composed of thousands of communities known as subreddits. You ll know you re in a subreddit because the URL on your browser will look something like this (https://www.reddit.com/r/pics) where pics is the name of the subreddit. Each subreddit has its own rules and regulations, and you have to follow these rules to the dot if you want to remain in the community. An infraction can cost you your account. The good news is creating an account is free and easy. If you re a Reddit user, you may think there s no way you can market your business on Reddit. After all, Reddit users are notorious for downvoting and banning self-promoting and self-serving members. The moment users get a whiff of someone trying to sell or promote something, that post or comment gets downvoted into oblivion. But there s a way you can circumvent this and benefit from Reddit s massive traffic! Read on to find out exactly how you and your brand can conquer Reddit. Why Your Brand Or Business Should Be On Reddit If you re scared you re going to get banned or shadow-banned on Reddit because of your business, don t be. Reddit is not at all scary. In fact, many
businesses market their brand on Reddit. But they don t go about it in an obvious or aggressive manner. Still not convinced? Here are the top reasons why your brand or business should be on Reddit: You can benefit from Reddit s massive traffic Millions of Redditors view more than 14 billion pages on Reddit every month. That s a lot of traffic! And it s really not surprising considering the popularity of this community-driven website. While Reddit is not a social media platform per se, it does have elements of being a social platform. For instance, you can upvote (similar to likes on Facebook), downvote, and share posts with other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. The more upvotes on a post, the higher the chances that the post will appear on Reddit s front page where millions of users and lurkers alike hang out. Imagine how much traffic your website will get if your post finds its way to the front page! If your site is hosted on a basic hosting plan, the massive traffic may cause your site to crash. If you anticipate a good amount of traffic from Reddit, perhaps you may want to upgrade your hosting so as not to upset Redditors who ll be landing on your site!
Thousands of active and highly-engaged communities a.k.a. subreddits Redditors log in to the site and spend an average of 15+ minutes per visit. That s a lot of minutes spent on the site! If you build a good reputation on a popular subreddit, you can get tons of visitors over to your website in a short span of time. To build a good reputation, you d need to give lots of value to the community first. This won t happen overnight. You need to have a solid reputation on the subreddit. People can easily check your history and activities on the site. You d want to have credibility on the platform by establishing good karma. Increase brand awareness and provide customer service Reddit is one of the best platforms for increasing brand awareness. Offer valuable comments in popular subreddits. Drop your brand name here and there (in a totally non-salesy way!), and you ll have tons of people googling your brand. Get people curious about what your brand does and how they can possibly benefit from your products or service. Another thing you can do on Reddit is provide customer service to your customers. For instance, if you see some comments about your brand whether it be positive or negative engage with these Redditors.
Reply to their comments and try to assuage any concerns they may have. This is one way you can build your reputation on the platform. If someone s unhappy and is publicly venting their frustrations on the platform, then you ve got to step up and do your best to make that person (and other Redditors) change their minds about you. Free to build your own community You can create your own subreddit for free. You can use it to build a community around your brand or your business. You can create a public subreddit (anyone can see posts and comments), or set it to private if you want it to be accessed exclusively by your customers or your employees. However, in order for you to create a subreddit, your account needs to be at least a month old and should have an unspecified number of positive karma. This means you need to do the hard work first and build your credibility on the platform before you can create your own subreddit. How To Use Reddit To Drive Traffic To Your Website As a business, your main goal of being on Reddit is to get sales and leads. Unlike other social media sites where you can easily advertise your products and services, you must approach marketing differently on Reddit. Learn rules of subreddit Each subreddit has its own set of rules that everyone needs to follow. Each subreddit will have its own mods or moderators who make sure everyone stays in line and follows the rules.
It can get quite confusing if you re new to Reddit so if you don t want to get banned, you have to read up on the rules first. If you want to build a good reputation in the community, you need to understand how the subreddit works and get the lay of the land, so to speak. Each subreddit has its own culture, and you ll find no shortage of Redditors willing to lend a hand if you need it. Check the most popular posts and find out why people loved it. Try to come up with similar high-value posts to get the ball rolling on your Reddit reputation. Solve people s problems and offer your solution People go on Reddit for a variety of reasons. Some go to ask for help, some just want to be entertained for a few minutes, while some are there to offer genuine help. If you want to establish your brand as a credible and trustworthy brand, you may want to consider looking for people s problems and then offering the solution to those problems. For instance, if you re in the business of helping people find jobs, then check out the relevant subreddits and go through the posts where people are asking for help to find good jobs. If you ve got a car wash business, perhaps you can offer some suggestions or tips on the best ways to wash cars without spending too much or wasting too much time.
Don t be too salesy always try to give value above all else Just like the examples I mentioned above, you want to provide solutions to people s pain points. But when you give your solutions, you don t want to come off as too aggressive or too salesy. Redditors have a reputation for hating on self-promoting users, so you be careful you don t become a persona non grata on the platform. Of course, you can easily create a new account when you get banned, but that s beside the point as it would mean you d need to start all over again. The main takeaway here is that you must always give value to the community. Even if you re promoting your brand, service or product, you still need to put the community above yourself. With every post and with every comment, check to see if the community will benefit from it before you hit the post button! Build a good reputation on the platform and reap positive karma There are two types of karma on Reddit post karma and comment karma. Both these types reflect the quality of your Reddit account. The higher the karma numbers, the more trusted and the more respected your account. The best way to get karma is to participate in the community. You get post karma for every upvote you receive from your posts so make sure your posts really add value to the subreddit. You get comment karma from upvotes you receive from your comments.
Usually, it s the witty comments that get plenty of upvotes so consider this when you start posting and commenting. Again, it s best to know the subreddit s culture before you get started so you don t stick out like a sore thumb! Promote discounts and deals in the right subreddits (r/deals) If you ve got a great promotion going on and you think Redditors can benefit from it, then you can head on over to the deals subreddit (r/deals) or any other relevant subreddit for your brand. Note, however, that the deals subreddit has a bunch of strict rules you need to follow so make sure you check out the sidebar if you don t want to get into trouble later. You can also promote your deals and offers in other subreddits, for example, local subreddits like your city or state subreddits, if available. You just need to make sure you don t go against any of the community s rules. Depending on the subreddit, you should maybe try to tone down your sales pitch and present first the benefits people will get from buying or subscribing to your service. Post on r/ama or r/iama AMA means Ask Me Anything while IAmA means I Am A Ask Me Anything. These two subreddits are similar with the main difference being r/ama having a smaller community.
If you ve got an interesting story to share with your readers, you can share it on these subreddits. But before you go thinking about your story, check out what past posters did how they titled their AMAs. What made people pay attention to it. Then think about how you can do the same. Think about something really interesting that you think will help others learn from your experience. If you want to talk about building a business from scratch, you can do that. But try to put a unique spin on your story so that people would want to engage with you and ask you questions. Be genuine. Don t try to come up with some fake story because if there s one thing many Redditors are good at, it s that they are excellent researchers. There s even a subreddit dedicated exclusively to people who B.S. on Reddit called r/quityourbullshit. Run a contest on a relevant subreddit Contents aren t just popular on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. It s also popular on Reddit. You just need to make sure you post your content on a relevant subreddit. Otherwise, you re going to get a bunch of upset Redditors showing up in your inbox! For starters, you can try posting on r/contests. Be sure to read the sidebar for their do s and don ts of posting contests. You can also try giving away freebies to introduce your brand to people. This is a great way to get feedback and reviews from people.
Check out r/freebies for physical items and r/efreebies if you re giving away digital items. Are You Ready To Start Using Reddit To Drive Traffic To Your Website? Learning how to use Reddit to help your business grow and drive traffic to your website will take some time. The platform is not like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube where promoting something is quite straightforward. With thousands of subreddits to choose from, you re going to have your work cut out for you. However, once you know your way around the platform, it s easy to make out which subreddits are going to help your cause and which are going to harm you. Just remember to always give value to the community first, and you ll reap the rewards later!